[NLA] accountability?

[Eileen Eckert]

Responding to Andrea:
"But if I am shelling out the funds, I want to know how they are being 
spent--account for the money, please--and the effectiveness of your program, 
another topic which gets confounded with this one."

There were a few other responses to my question about how "accountability" 
measures help learners. I don't think anyone who wrote is arguing against 
accountability, what I hear from those who wrote is that what we have is not 
accountability.

My take on it is that what we have now is a veneer of accountability for 
those who prefer statistics to truth because "truth" is too complex and 
messy (and requires people to think and decide for themselves when they 
could be watching reality TV instead--oops, my cynicism is showing).

You said it Andrea: it <is> a swamp. Nothing substitutes for having the 
knowledge and experience to distinguish among diverse (that's a <good> 
thing, right?) programs and make critical judgments. Isn't that what you're 
attempting to do when you ask people to give some background when they post, 
and when you say you value most highly the experiences and viewpoints of 
people who are working with learners? To draw a facetious parallel, could a 
nationally-administered point system for credibility of people who post to 
the NLA ever substitute for your own ability to make a value judgment? Or 
for mine, or anyone else's? And if we disagree, does the mere fact of the 
disagreement make one of us wrong, or does it highlight the extremely 
valuable diversity (that word again) of knowledge, expertise, and 
perspectives that are brought to bear in evaluating?

So how is it "accountability" to try and erase real differences among 
programs and learners and judge everyone by one standard?

I'm glad you posted that message, because that is the argument we're up 
against and I don't have answers either.












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